Chapter 5

Saturday, December 13, 2014, 12:29 p.m. Locking Clark’s Pump-N-Shop’s front doors, Rebecca circled the building, accounting for all other access points. Satisfied, she ambled back to the RAV4, high on a sense of accomplishment, however short-lived.

Huntington Mart on Charleston Avenue bore a similar 4-island layout and convenience store design to Clark’s Pump-N-Shop, although somewhat older. Pulling into the lot, Rebecca eyed the Ford Focus, Chevy Suburban, and Audi at the pumps. The white compact sat patiently with gas flap open; the Suburban was in the process of being fueled--or had been last night when the owner pulled a Stephen King and went splitsville (Rebecca was beginning to think herself trapped in the horror writer’s latest creep-out thriller)--and the Audi sat with both front doors ajar. None appeared to have been left running.

She parked before the entrance, killed the ignition, and climbed out. She noted the same spooky stillness, the normally unnoticed background noise that demanded attention today. Did she imagine hearing the very flow of electricity through the lines? Looking up and around, she spotted the source of a particularly irritating hum, a drum-shaped transformer high on a power pole. The lights controlling the intersection changed, directing her attention to a large steel box on the corner, from which emanated clacking sounds. Rebecca thought all that switching nonsense would be soundlessly electronic nowadays.

Retrieving the shotgun, her gaze lit upon a red-lettered sign above a rectangular yellow box: EMERGENCY PUMP CUTOFF. The box housed a big red button emblazoned with PUSH. Slowing in indecision, she redirected her steps, wondering if this wasn’t a better solution than hunting down the breaker boxes inside. What did she care if the lights and signage remained on? Her only concern was the gas pumps. Once the power finally failed, everything went dark, anyway.

Conditioning made her glance around, nervous. Don’t be an asshole, she thought sourly. You’d welcome someone shouting at you for killing the pumps.

She cautiously raised her hand, placed her fingertips against the button and pushed lightly, wincing at the slight movement. Muttering, she jabbed sharply this time and the button clacked home against the plastic housing with a sharp crack. Yelping, she snatched her hand back and quick-stepped away. Miserable switch, she thought, looking around.

The pumps appeared no different than before. Crossing to the closest island, however, she confirmed the display screens on both sides of the pump were blank. So too the ones on the pumps facing her island. At least something went right, today.

She stepped down from the island and gazed up, searching for telltale contrails, or the glint of a high-flying airliner. Recently she’d heard that you could spot the International Space Station passing overhead, a pinprick of light in the blue sky. Using binoculars, you could make out the skeletal structure, if you knew where to look. Was the ISS still in orbit, she wondered? Was it manned by crew members nearly as panic-stricken as she? Hello, Houston, you have a problem.

Inside, Rebecca called out the requisite, “Is anybody here?” and executed a quick check of the aisles, then headed toward the drinks cooler. She had no plans to lock up, wanting only a cold bottle of Diet Coke to slake her thirst. Getting half-drunk last night had left her dehydrated and cotton-mouthed today. Removing a 20 oz. bottle and twisting off the cap, she gulped down half the contents, belching as she had in the kitchen. Diet Coke was her preferred soda; Mom occasionally tried to wean her off onto Sprite. She didn’t really care for Sprite that much.

Suddenly and intensely missing her mom, Rebecca swiped at her eyes, and then her nose, hissing, “Stop that stupid shit, dammit!” She capped and jammed the bottle in her coat pocket and headed toward the counter. Conditioning and timidity refused to let her leave the store without paying first. Angry and cursing, she dug two dollars from her wallet and slapped them down on the counter, and then left. She couldn’t stop crying.

At Kenetic Drive, she yanked the wheel hard and entered the parking lot too fast, catching the curb with her right rear tire and jouncing up and over the island with a teeth-jarring thud. Had any vehicle blocked her way, she would certainly have rammed it, possibly totaling both the RAV4 and herself. Bringing Teddy to a jolting halt between pump islands, she gripped the wheel, breathing raggedly. “Asshole!” she railed. “Stupid, idiot asshole, Rebecca!”

Losing her temper was monumentally stupid, even more so than letting herself get rattled and then getting behind the wheel of a dangerous, if much beloved vehicle. She not only risked serious injury to herself, but Teddy was her lifeline, her only means of transport in this crazy landscape. A blown tire might leave her stranded; she had no idea how to change a flat tire, were she even physically able to, which she seriously doubted. Were Dad here, he’d snatch the keys from the ignition, and fix her with that exasperated stare that made her feel like a 5-year-old again. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I miss you, Daddy. I miss all you guys.”

Taking five minutes to calm, Rebecca shut Teddy off where he sat, climbed out, and tucked the Remington beneath her arm. An older Dodge Ram with rusting side panels--it was either brown or gold under all the dirt, Rebecca couldn’t tell which--sat at Pump Number 2. She crouched, spotting a pump handle on the ground beside it. “No, no, no,” she muttered.

She circled from the rear, noting the open flap, and dangling gas cap. The driver had already filled up, she guessed, or was about to. When he or she vanished, the handle fell to the ground, though with no sign of spilt gas. Seating the handle correctly into the slot in the pump, she reinstalled the gas cap, and closed the door.

The Ram had seen a lifetime of hard use. The bed was filthy with age, containing a greasy transmission strapped on its side to a pallet of 2x4’s. A trio of ancient black rims were stacked on one side, alongside a sloppy stack of various-sized wood planks. A drum of axle grease--if she read the nearly illegible label correctly--and what she guessed was a drive shaft, sat against the battered tailgate. She eyed a lopsided gun rack mounted in the rear window; it contained a scoped hunting rifle, and a battered shotgun. The owner had gone hunting yesterday, she reasoned, or had planned to today, and was on his way out of town when the event occurred.

She examined the worn shotgun, and then her dad’s spotless Remington beneath her arm. It occurred to Rebecca that she had never given it a test fire. A serious blunder, given the consequences, wouldn’t you say?

“Yes,” she muttered. “I would say.” She looked around.

Bordering the station along Hal Greer was a wide verge of grass. Ambling over, she followed the curb alongside the convenience store to the rear of the building, where the verge gave way to a large, tapered field, bordered on the left by trees. After a hundred yards or so, the field petered away to nothing; this would do nicely, she thought.

Checking the safety, setting it to the off position, Rebecca tucked the shotgun against her side, the stock protruding safely past her hip. She staggered her feet in a boxer’s stance and gripped the weapon tightly. She angled the barrel slightly down, and away from the trees. Fortunately, no vehicles had wrecked along this stretch of road, leaving it safely free of obstruction. Squinting, she pulled the trigger.

KA-BLAM!

Startled, Rebecca cried out and staggered back a step. The recoil had spun her half a turn to her right, the barrel rising uncontrollably with the discharge. Her ears rang; she hadn’t expected such a loud blast. Blinking, working her jaws unconsciously in response to her momentary deafness, Rebecca stared at the weapon, open-mouthed. If she’d been flat-footed, it might have knocked her down, she thought. She laughed, chagrined, loaded a fresh shell into the chamber and reset the safety.

Back around front, she smacked the red button without hesitation, walked to the entrance and yanked open the door. “Anybody here?” she yelled. Question unanswered, she released the door and turned away.

This station had 5 pump islands, rather than the accustomed 4. The other vehicle fueling at the time of Aaron’s disappearance was a red Ford pick-up. Vaguely familiar, she thought it might belong to someone on Wiltshire Boulevard, down near 18th Street. She ambled over and glanced in.

The passenger’s seat contained a brown leather purse; a pair of McDonald’s drink cups sat nestled in the console, the one closest to the dashboard a large drink, the other a medium. Both looked to be 3/4’s full of dark liquid. Rebecca had passed the only close-by McDonald’s on her way down from Charleston Avenue a few minutes ago. Rather than make her stomach clench, the thought of a McDouble and French fry made it rumble. Laughing, she returned to the RAV4.

According to her phone, two more stations lay near her house: the Shell station at 8th Avenue and 22nd Street, and the slightly closer 20th Street Service Center, which proved to be a converted auto repair shop, with plenty of cars and trucks out front, but no pumps. Pulling into the Shell station’s lot, she wisely avoided any undo speed and any raised curbs and parked alongside a green Volkswagen Passat. A cold sandwich from the cooler was in order, she thought, and a spare bottle of Diet Coke. Shutting off the engine and scanning the front of the store for the disconnect switch, Rebecca suffered a disconnect of her own.

She blinked slowly, eyeing the signs in the windows. What language was that? Confused, she looked all about, noting the ads on the parking lot signs were clearly in English, also those atop the three pumps. Backing half a dozen paces, she gazed up to discover the lettering on the fascia to be the same unfamiliar scrawl as the lettering in the windows. Was that Arabic? Disjointed, she turned slowly about, searching for other anomalous use of the language. She found none.

Rebecca had passed this station any number of times, just in the past month. Never had she noticed this bizarre signage and writing, nor heard any mention of it from her friends. Foreigners owned and operated stores in Huntington, sure, just like everywhere else in the country--look at any 7-11, for instance--but never had she witnessed the use of a foreign language on a store rather than English. Well, maybe on Chinese restaurants, but that was it. Huntington, West Virginia was staunchly Republican and not known for tolerant attitudes or embracing change.

She returned to the car, reached inside to retrieve the Remington, and tucked it beneath her arm. Stepping onto the sidewalk, she went first to the shut-off switch, depressed it with a strike of her palm--the lettering on the sign above was in the same weird scrawl as the window signs--and then proceeded to the entrance. The store hours, street address, even the cigarette ads were in the foreign script. Shaking her head, Rebecca opened the door.

“Hello? Anybody in here?” She gripped the shotgun left-handed, index finger tapping the trigger guard. Her heart rate had accelerated, her breathing was labored. This was so fucking wrong. Jamming her eyes closed, she snapped them open again and scanned the interior. It wasn’t only the signage and window ads that were wrong.

Holding her breath, Rebecca stepped inside, shotgun gripped in both hands. Twice she’d vacationed in Mexico with her folks, and that was nothing like this. The stores in Mexico mostly looked like they did here in Huntington, with a few minor exceptions. Here, she might have teleported 7000 miles to a store in Saudi Arabia, she thought. She closed her eyes again and shook her head.

The store had the same general layout she’d seen three times previously today, with mostly the same offerings. Every item in sight, however, bore the strange Semitic writing. Advancing cautiously to the nearest display, she easily recognized lip balm, key chains, manicure sets, packages of tissue paper, whatnot. Save for the writing, they were identical to items everywhere else today. Duracell battery packs had the familiar brown and gold color scheme; Eveready battery packs displayed the pink Energizer Bunny. Rebecca touched one with a fingertip, ready to snatch it back. If a pin dropped, she’d probably scream. This was beyond impossible, bordering on madness. What had happened here?

Stumbling toward the coolers, Rebecca scanned both sides of the aisle, recognizing easily identified candy packs--Skittles, Swedish Fish, Sour Patch Kids (her favorite) --while to her right were stocks of medicines, medical supplies, and household goods. No mistaking the orange and yellow bottle of Tide, minus the Tide branding. Was that even legal, she wondered? Wouldn’t the licensing companies demand inclusion of the English language product name? Yet nowhere had she spotted a word of written English. She reached the drink coolers.

Coca-Cola, Sprite, Pepsi, Diet-Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, 7-UP: all bore the unreadable Arabic script. Yet, eyeing the row of bottles with the silver labels and black lettering, she silently mouthed the words Diet Coke, and then closed and reopened her eyes. The bottles read Diet Coke in plain English. Not the gold-labeled caffeine-free versions, below; those were lettered in Arabic, also.

“What...?” she croaked.

She tucked the shotgun beneath her right arm and clumsily opened the cooler door and lifted out the front bottle; the one behind it was lettered in English also, she noted, and the third bottle also appeared to be normal. She rotated the bottle in her hand, revealing the name, and scoffed: “Yeah, right!”

When labeled bottles first appeared last spring, she and her friends had scoured the coolers in the 7-11’s closest their school, much to the chagrin of the counter clerks: silly, giggling schoolgirls. Until now, she had never found a Rebecca-branded Diet Coke bottle. She had one in her hand, though, with every other bottle lettered in Arabic. “This is bullshit!” she choked.

Stuffing the bottle into her coat pocket, she removed the bottle now at the front of the slide and read it as well. Her eyes flared and her heart beat erratically. She dropped the shotgun and bottle on the floor, staggered back against the open cooler door, choking “No!” as she wrongly understood the name on the dropped bottle. She kicked it in her panic to get away, sending the bottle spinning crazily across the floor to impact the terrazzo base of the adjacent cooler. It rebounded and rolled across the floor, coming to rest beneath the end of a shelf, name-side up. A casual observer might have to squat to see the semi-obscured name that had frightened her so. It read Jesus.

Jessica 5

Saturday, December 13, 2014. 12:28 p.m. Startled, Jessica charged inside the lobby, forgetting the scattered glass. Skidding, wind-milling frantically, trying to keep her balance, she finally righted, hissing in agony. She grabbed her right shoulder with one hand, and her bruised hip with the other, and tiptoed away from the glass onto the clear flooring. It was like being on ice, she thought in aggravation, a perfect America’s Funniest Home video.

The phone had already rung 5 times. “Where are you?” she shouted, listening desperately. The old-fashioned trill came from this floor, she thought, far back and to the right. But reverberating in the unearthly quiet the way it was, the ringing could originate from anywhere, 2nd or 3rd floors, included. Hobbling toward the guard desk, behind which a sergeant was probably normally stationed (she assumed, from too many TV shows), Jessica cried out: “Is anyone here? Can anyone hear that phone ringing? Does anyone know where it is?”

Does anyone know what’s fucking going on, she didn’t add.

Circling the desk, she chose the rightmost of two doors into the ground floor offices and yanked the handle. Locked. Card readers were embedded in both doorjambs, along with electronic keypads that Jessica had no hope of guessing the combos for. Cursing like a cop, she whirled and examined the Sergeant’s Desk for a set of keys, a pass-card, anything that might get her through the doors. She knew one method, didn’t she?

Laughing almost hysterically, she limped to the sign and mistakenly lifted it one-handed. Trying again with two hands this time, with a grimace and stinging eyes, she returned to the Sergeant’s Desk. By now the phone had rung 15 times. “Here!” she yelled, hurling the sign. “Take this, dammit!”

The sign ricocheted off the glass--nonetheless triggering a second strident alarm--and skittered diagonally across the lobby. “Whoa!” she hollered in surprise. “You piece of shit!”

She staggered after the still-rocking sign, then yelped and cringed away as the door-glass behind her shattered and cascaded to the floor. The alarm was suddenly louder, but unexpectedly, it also went dead. Panting, listening to the phone ring somewhere in the distance, Jessica turned to stare at the empty door. A moment later, the phone went silent also.

“Fuck!” she spat, kicking the sign across the lobby with her good foot.

-------//-------

The ground floor proved free of human inhabitants. Moving cautiously door to door, office to office, intently conscious of being alone--and subject to accidental entrapment (the building was designed to forcibly segregate unlucky visitors, after all)--Jessica discovered that all doors she tried responded to a pass-card discovered in the second office she’d looked in. She bore no illusions concerning the recently called telephone in a building with hundreds of desk phones present. Unless the caller called back, that opportunity was lost forever.

How long would the power last? Don’t get trapped in here with a useless pass-card, she thought.

She entered a bullpen area with electronic whiteboards, digital displays, with laptops and tablets on every desk. She was surrounded by enclosed offices, interrogation rooms, and conference rooms right out of The Closer or Major Crimes. It looked almost cozy.

Hello?” she called for the umpteenth time. “Is anybody here?”

According to a directory in the visitor’s lounge, the commanding officer of Precinct 6 was Capt. Tomas Alejandro, with Lt. Dean Maddox acting chief of detectives. She assumed Capt. Alejandro was ensconced on the 2nd or 3rd floor; Lt. Madden’s office was to her right, the door invitingly open.

“Hello?” she called again. “I’m here. Is anyone else?”

Flicking off the lights in Lt. Madden’s office, and then turning them on again, Jessica gazed at the overhead fluorescent lights, and then out around the bullpen. It was her first consideration of a perplexing and troubling question: with everyone gone, who had shut down nuclear power plants last night?

“Oh, Jesus,” she muttered, grabbing out her iPhone.

With trembling fingers, she activated Google and searched nuclear power plants near Knoxville, Tennessee. Google listed two: North Ridge Nuclear Generating Station in Gwinnett County up north, and Surry Nuclear Power Station west of Newport News. Per the listings, both stations were currently active. Other stations ranged up and down the East Coast.

Her eyes lost focus. Newport News lies directly north of Norfolk, Virginia, across Hampton Roads. Nuclear powered vessels docked in the navy shipyards in Norfolk, submarines, also, she thought. Those vessels and submarines carried nuclear weapons. Was anyone guarding those, she wondered? How far did this insanity go, anyway? Had it spread to locations beyond Tennessee?

The only number she’d tried away from the area was that of her dad, in Quiet Cove, Virginia. It was nothing to get his voicemail on weekends. Her parents were both in their late-30s, expectedly-active adults. Often Dad spent Saturday nights away, sometimes Friday nights, as well. Calling his landline was stupid.

She dialed his cell phone again, breathing deeply, working to tamp down her panic. Logic insisted that Mom, Dad, or both would answer their phones and talk her away from the edge. Instinct, however, warned this disappearance extended well beyond the horizon and beyond American shores. Given her presence inside a police station that didn’t exist yesterday, Jessica was forced to consider (if not acknowledge), that somehow, this craziness directly involved, or was directed at her. How else to explain she and the police station’s presence in Bizarro World?

“No,” she objected, laughing. “That is such bullshit, Jessica!”

Would the station exist had she not Googled nearby locations?

“Don’t be stupid!” she scoffed. “This ain’t about you, idiot. It can’t be about you!”

She snapped off the light, and then turned it back on, again. “Fuck,” she muttered, moving cautiously to the desk. She eyed the holstered automatic sitting beside the phone. The handgun sported wood grips with a blackened steel body. The weapon fit snugly inside the burnished leather holster, captured by a strap over the hammer. On the desk beside the gun was a folded-back leather wallet containing a gold detective’s shield. Embossed across the bottom was the rank, Lieutenant. With a fingertip, she nudged the badge, and then the holstered gun. “Uh, uh,” she refuted, shaking her head. She wasn’t that crazy.

Hurriedly exiting the office, she snapped off the light, and beelined for a nearby bullpen desk. Yanking out the chair, she sat down, intent on examining the desktop and the Dell laptop sitting atop it for any clue to last night’s events. Simply determining when everything went amok last night might help, she thought.

Conversely, folders proved to be case files or ongoing investigations; loose papers were warrants, circulars, interoffice and interdepartmental bulletins, miscellaneous typed notes, and stuff like that. Nothing gave evidence of a developing, or ongoing disaster in Knoxville or White Pine last night—or anyplace else in the state. Additional bullpen desks proved equally frustrating. On none of them, could Jessica access the password protected laptops or tablets.

“Fuck!” she finally screamed in frustration. Slamming the lid closed, she shoved a laptop off the back of a desk, then swatted papers and folders off the side. “Where is everyone?” she screamed, grasping her shoulder. Her entire right side ached, but her shoulder hurt most, even worse than her sprained knee. “Please don’t let anything be broken,” she moaned, fingering the tender knob of bone. Who the hell would fix it?

Rising, still gripping her shoulder, Jessica gazed around the bullpen and surrounding offices in despair. Go home, she thought. Get something more to eat and drink. She was nauseous, lightheaded, and weak-kneed. Go, she commanded, before the backup generator fails, and plunges you into pitch darkness!